I’ve Excelled Myself

I want to talk to you about spreadsheets.

The first spreadsheet I can remember using was, I think, Lotus123. This ran on a DOS PC in the back room of a shop in Southampton where I worked for a year or two before beginning my software career, and it was used to gather the sales figures and send them to head office. I remember the workflow was somewhat dull and grim, the cause of a certain amount of swearing – but that’s probably unsurprising. Software in 1988 had a long way to climb before it became truly user-friendly. But even back then, I could see the potential embodied in the idea of calculations that could flow around a table, magically providing answers.

These days I’m an old hand at Excel, and I often say that I think it’s the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft. I’ve tried Apple’s Numbers, but it just doesn’t have anything like the same look and feel and I keep getting the suspicion that it’s trying to sabotage me, make me wear a suit and force me to do Keynote presentations instead.

I struggle to imagine organising my life without Excel, and it’s become a sort of extension of my brain. Here are some of the things I’m currently doing with it:

Expense Records

I keep a record of everything I’ve spent for over twenty years on writing, music and photography. There’s no real purpose to this, since I don’t run any of those as a business (yet). I just like to know how much my hobbies cost me.

Electricity Readings

I live in a farmhouse and have two meters. One is for the house and the other is for an outbuilding where I keep (and charge) my car. This spreadsheet allows me to enter the readings each month and immediately see a detailed prediction of the next bill so I can budget for it.

Bedding by Temperature Range

For over a year, I’ve noted the forecast minimum and maximum temperatures each night (with wind chill), the rough amount of wind and rain on a subjective scale of 0 to 5, various factors that could affect my sleep quality such as eating late, alcohol, whether I feel unwell, etc. I then note a number of facts about what I do to keep warm that night – which duvets, blankets etc. are on the bed? Am I wearing thermals? A hat? Even a dressing gown? It gets pretty cold here. The next morning, I enter an assessment of how well I slept, so that I can match them up. Now that I have a year of this data, I can look at the forecast for the night, and decide on the blankets, thermals, hat etc. that I need, rather than just logging what I guessed. I do this by finding a similar night in the past when I slept very well, and copying the configuration.

Car Mileage

I have a limited-mileage lease for my car. So every Sunday I enter the mileage, and I see a graph of the five years, with a line that I need to stay beneath (see image). It’s currently way under where it could be, which is good!

Date Reminder

Keeps me on track remembering birthdays and anniversaries. It can highlight special birthdays in green, warn me when I need to buy a card, take into account the days needed for posting and even add extra for weekends. I’ve used this one for decades now.

Christmas Card List

Tracks all the cards I send, and allows me to keep addresses up to date, sort by category (family, friends etc.) for batched processing.

Time Sheets for work

I make a new copy of this each month, and I’ve been using the same spreadsheet since about 1997, adapting it and tweaking as I go. Since in that time I’ve flipped from contractor to employee and back again, working for various companies, features have been added for a large variety of reasons. As a result, this is the most complex spreadsheet I use. The things it does are way too numerous to list here, but it’s so powerful that it’s almost like having a dedicated piece of software for tracking my work and holiday time. My employer uses Atlassian JIRA and Tempo and in theory I could just use those, but there’s a certain advantage to having a familiar tool that has evolved and grown with you over decades. Even though I end up manually transferring the time logged into Tempo, I still prefer having the control the Excel workbook gives me over planning and analysis.

Final Thoughts

What’s interesting about the use cases above is that there is more than one dimension to them. Some are more calculation-oriented, while others are chiefly databases. But in almost all cases, it’s not entirely one or the other. This is what spreadsheets have given us: the ability to externalise and extend both our short term working memory and our computational skills. They are literally our mental sidekicks. Like a posthuman remembering its former primitive human brain, I wouldn’t want to go back to doing without them because it would feel like becoming stupid again.